Intimate Portraits Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Piano Trio in A minor

Modéré

Pantoum: Assez vif

Passacaille: Très large

Final: Animé

Ravel wrote his only Piano Trio in 1914, just as his French homeland was tipping inexorably into the protracted horror of the First World War. He didn’t shirk from what he felt was his national duty, volunteering for the French Air Force, but was rejected on account of his age and recurring heart problems. This Trio however – apart perhaps from the finale – seems shadowed by very different, more private preoccupations. Ravel’s relationship with his mother was particularly close (her death, three years later plunged him into what he described as ‘hideous despair’), and it is to the sounds of her native Basque territory that he turned in this work. At the same time he was also working on a piano concerto based on Basque themes and, although that project was later abandoned, ideas associated with the concerto also left their mark on the Trio.

The spirit of a particular form of Basque dance, the zortziko, can be felt in the rhythm of the opening theme, which divides into recurring patterns of 3 + 2 + 3, with a simpler cross-rhythm heard in the piano left hand. This may sound drily abstract, but it creates a curiously weightless, slightly disembodied effect. It’s said that Ravel got the idea while watching ice-cream vendors dance a fandango in the French Basque resort of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. If so, he seems to have been mistaken in believing that what he heard was a Basque tune; but many of the finest creative ideas are born from misunderstandings, and what Ravel made from what he remembered seems far removed from dancing ice-cream salesmen or -women. Despite a couple of more overtly troubled moments, the first movement as a whole feels unworldly – tender, delicately sensuous, yet also at times strangely withdrawn, especially at the ethereal ending.

In contrast, the title of the second movement, Pantoum, refers to a form of traditional Malaysian poetry which typically deals with two separate themes in parallel. In Ravel’s Pantoum a sharp, brittle opening theme led by piano alternates with the singing string theme that follows. Then in the central trio section the strings continue to play with the opening theme while the piano develops a suave, expressive chordal theme in a broader four-time – more parallelism. The rhythmic complexities of Basque music evidently left their mark here too, and the combination of dreaminess and unease (especially in the trio) intensifies the tension at which the first movement mostly hinted.

Then comes what feels – unusually for Ravel – close to direct emotional revelation. This third movement is another dance form, a passacaglia: i.e. a set of variations built upon a bass theme, here presented way down in the piano’s left hand – the metallic, deep-bell-like sonority adds a sinister character to what is already a dark-toned melody. This builds steadily to an impassioned climax which, as the music reaches its height, recalls the agonized, downward-sliding ‘Spear’ motif from Wagner’s Parsifal – a motif with intensely erotic overtones. Could Ravel be dropping a heavy hint here? This striking near-quotation accompanies music of growing anguish, perhaps also of loss. The movement then falls back gradually to the somber low sounds of the opening – it’s almost like watching a ballet sequence unwind in reverse.

After this, the vigorous finale seems to want to dance away dark thoughts. Again, the rhythms are complicated, alternating between five in a bar and seven in a bar, with the piano’s first theme rather like a determinedly upbeat version of the ghostly, lilting first-movement theme. Echoes of war might also be heard in the piano’s imitation of trumpet fanfares halfway through the movement. ‘Yes, I am working on the Trio with the sureness and lucidity of a madman’, Ravel wrote a few days after war was declared, with the end of the work very much in sight. Is there exuberance and joy in this ‘sureness and lucidity’, or is there – as Ravel’s comment implies – something slightly unhinged about it? Of course, music cannot answer categorical questions like that; but the feeling that some troubling, deeply personal utterance resides at the heart of this music is – for some listeners at least – hard to dismiss.

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major, D898

Allegro moderato

Andante un poco mosso

Scherzo: Allegro

Rondo: Allegro vivace

The death of Ludwig van Beethoven in March 1827 was a shock and cause of genuine grief to the thirty-year-old Franz Schubert, but it was also a liberation. Schubert had turned to Beethoven for inspiration and for formal models over and over again in his instrumental and orchestral works, but Beethoven’s departure meant that the stage was now clear for Schubert himself. During 1827 and 1828 – his last year – he worked feverishly hard, not only creating (and perhaps more importantly finishing) masterpieces on ambitious scales, but setting about shoring up what he felt were his technical weaknesses: in the last few months of his life he signed up for a course of counterpoint lessons with the noted Viennese pedagogue Simon Sechter, later teacher of Anton Bruckner.

If all this suggests a young man with everything to look forward to, privately the truth was much more complicated. Schubert had good cause to be worried about his health. Whether the underlying cause was syphilis is disputed, but there were recurring bouts of incapacitating sickness – which only make Schubert’s productivity during his good patches all the more astonishing – and with them came terrible depression. When he was well, Schubert’s exuberant cheerfulness could spill over repeatedly into his music, but he had also long been inclined to brood on mortality: in his vocal works death is sometimes depicted as terrifying, at other times as something fascinating, seductive. There is also a sense of intense emotional, sometimes clearly erotic longing – longing which often seems doomed to remain unfulfilled. Of course, such preoccupations were widespread among young German-speaking Romantics in the early nineteenth century, but the intensity of Schubert’s engagement with these themes suggests that there was far more to this than fashionable posing. ‘We are never more desolate than when we think we have lost love’, wrote Sigmund Freud. Whether there was some such devastating loss in Schubert’s life is unknown – so many elements of his biography remain shadowy. But none of the Romantics expressed that sense of desolation more heartrendingly than Schubert, especially in his two great song-cycles: Die schöne Müllerin (‘The Beautiful Miller’s Girl’) and the harrowing Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’).

Schubert wrote his two Piano Trios in 1827, probably around the time he was completing Winterreise. Both are laid out on an unusually grand scale – even Beethoven never attempted anything quite as long in this form. It’s sometimes said that the two trios reflect complementary aspects of Schubert’s personality: the First prevailingly light in mood, the Second – especially in its minor-key slow movement – turning more to the darker side. But it’s a characteristic of much of Schubert’s music that it can ‘turn’ emotionally in seconds, and it often seems to be poised delicately between two very different, even antagonistic psychological states. The great pianist and Schubert specialist Artur Schnabel used to sing these words to the melody of the finale of Schubert’s last piano sonata, composed just months before his death: ‘I don’t know if I’m happy, I don’t know if I’m sad.’

The opening of the First Trio seems clear enough in its expressive agenda. The first theme, on the strings, is robust and confident-sounding, above an energetically forward-striding piano accompaniment. It’s one of many ideas in Schubert that remind us how much he loved long, vigorous country walks. But Schubert had a tendency to plant clues as to deeper meanings in his instrumental works in the form of allusions to songs. The strings’ tune here strongly recalls a recurring figure in the song Des Sängers Habe (‘The Minstrel’s Treasure’), where it announces the words, ‘If all my happiness shatters, if I lose all I have, just leave me my zither, I shall still be glad and rich.’ Later the singer tells us, ‘If love and friendship fail, I can renounce them proudly, but not my zither.’ Strikingly, when Schubert set this poem, two years before he composed the First Piano Trio, he changed the pronouns from the third person to the first – the minstrel is now clearly ‘I’. There are moments of hesitation, of harmonic uncertainty later in the Trio’s first movement that bring us close to the song’s mood of ambiguous resolution.

As for the wonderful Andante, is this a blissful love duet for violin and cello, as it first seems? Or is it the regret-filled embodiment of an impossible dream – a dream so movingly depicted in numerous Schubert songs? As in so many of his finest late slow movements there is anguished music in this movement too, and neither emotional state can be said to ‘win out’ against the other. The folk-dance dominated Scherzo brings us back to earth: here surely is a rural tavern scene, the very picture of Austrian Gemütlichkeit – cosiness, conviviality, good food and plenty of drink. The waltz-like central trio recalls the slow-movement melody, now apparently purged of troubling emotional undercurrents.

Folksy exuberance breaks out again in the finale, but this turns out to be a strikingly complex movement, in which the cheerfully playful opening theme is led off into strange harmonic adventures, its darting forward movement disrupted by heavy asymmetrical rhythms, especially a disconcertingly emphatic ONE-two TWO-two THREE-two figure. The final Presto dash to the finishing line could be pure high spirits, but for some commentators there is an element of unease, of over-insistence – like the minstrel’s claim in Des Sängers Habe that the loss of love, health, and finally life, is nothing to him. At the very least, the ending of the First Piano Trio gives us permission to doubt that.

INTIMATE PORTRAITS: RAVEL & SCHUBERT

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